


Starlight

by nivo



Category: Mamamoo, f(x)
Genre: Ambiguity, Bullying, F/F, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 01:26:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6033030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nivo/pseuds/nivo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All she wants is to see the stars she was named after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starlight

The first time Byulyi runs away, all she wants is to see the stars she was named after. She's six years old and she isn't running from anything – not yet – it's just that her dad told her the stars only shine in the dark. And so Byulyi sets out to find the dark.

She gets as far as the narrow alley opening from their street, no more than a minute's walk even for her little legs. Here she has to stop to consult the fat tabby the neighbor lady is always feeding. Byulyi kneels on the pavement – cool now, where it was steaming after an evening shower just a little while ago – and holds out a hand to the cat, feeling regretful about not bringing any snacks on her adventure. The cat refuses her like it always does, its eyes narrowed into lazy slits as it examines Byulyi's outstretched hand and finds her lacking.

The buildings loom tall around Byulyi, stretching so far up into the sky it makes her neck ache just trying to find their roofs. It's dark in the alley, much darker than it was back in the street, and yet when she flops onto her back – getting water and dirt on her clothes; her mom won't be happy about this, she realizes belatedly – there are no stars in the sky.

Maybe normal stars are like shooting stars and you're supposed to wait for them to come out. Or maybe they're like the cat – now sleeping on top of a trashcan, curled into a ball – and you're supposed to offer them something. Kind of like dead people. Byulyi doesn't really get dead people; Grandma always used to cook for Grandpa until Grandpa 'went away,' and now Byulyi's mom is always making Grandpa dishes he never seems to eat. Byulyi is not supposed to touch that food – the one time she tried, Mom yelled at her and then Dad said she was too little to understand, and Mom sighed and said, much more quietly, that Byulyi couldn't eat Grandpa's dinner because that would make Grandpa sad and Byulyi a bad girl. And Byulyi nodded and said that she understood, even though she really didn't and still doesn't.

The wet pavement is cool against her back, and she's getting kind of sleepy. She tries closing her eyes – maybe the stars are just shy, she reasons, and they will come out if they think Byulyi's asleep for good. Maybe dead people also come to visit only when Byulyi's asleep, after dinner. That would certainly explain why Grandpa never eats with them.

The next time she opens her eyes, all she sees is a pale face framed by a curtain of dark hair.

“Are you dead?” Byulyi whispers, awed because she didn't _really_ expect to be proven right.

The lady's mouth twitches. She isn't really smiling, but somehow she still manages to look amused.

“Astute child, aren't you? What are you doing out here?”

“Waiting for the stars to come out,” Byulyi says, and then feels the need to explain, “They only come out in the dark, you know.”

“I see,” the lady says, nodding thoughtfully. “Aren't you afraid of the dark?”

Byulyi scrunches her nose. “ _Why_?”

The lady huffs a quiet laugh and runs a hand through her hair. She's very beautiful, Byulyi thinks; not beautiful like Mom or Teacher Kim or Mrs. Jung across the street, but like that one lady in Mom's favorite drama; the one who lives in a palace and always has flowers in her hair and tears in her eyes.

“There's a fine line between bravery and foolishness,” the lady tells her. “Has no one told you that bad things happen to little girls in the dark?”

It is much, much later – after Byulyi is shaken awake by her hysterical mother in the little alley right down from their house; after she is proclaimed a 'dreamer' by the nice uncle she has to visit twice a week for _ages_ because her mom is scared she will run away again, clutching Byulyi's hand in her own bony, sweaty one wherever they go; after Byulyi graduates one school only to enter another one – that Byulyi wishes she could tell the ghost how wrong she was. Nothing bad has ever happened to Byulyi in the dark. There's nothing lurking among the mothballs in the twilight zone under her bed, no sound save for the pounding of her own heart under the safety of her blanket.

All the bad things happen in the day instead; in school bathrooms and literature classes, on sunlit benches and by cafeteria tables in between bites of food. No great tragedy befalls Byulyi, but there's still the mundane, thoughtless cruelty so many people are so good at without even trying.

Byulyi doesn't so much run away at sixteen as she simply fails to return home after cram school. There are no stars above the city – because of light pollution, she knows now, because such is the nature of light; it ruins everything it touches – and Byulyi is curious to see if it's any different in the less lived-in areas of town; above abandoned construction sites reclaimed by nature, overgrown with greenery like the ancient tombs of civilizations long lost.

Byulyi doesn't run, but she walks until her shiny new shoes have chafed the tender skin clear off her heels; until the bottoms of her socks are as blood-soaked as the knees have been since someone planted a hand smack in between her shoulder blades after her last class and _pushed_ , sending Byulyi skidding across the pavement in front of the school gate, where huge groups of students were still milling about. It was perfect timing, Byulyi will give them that.

Byulyi walks until she can't walk anymore; until there are seven missed calls and a dozen unopened texts on her phone, her eyes are desert-dry, and her blouse is sticking damply to her back and the tired nooks of her body.

She catches little glimpses of the ghost here and there, out of the corner of her eye; behind trees and in the secret spaces between buildings where unfriendly tabbies and the dead go to live. She can't help but wonder if she's still a dreamer, or her classmates are right and she's really more of a freak than anything.

Later – after her mother cries tears of helplessness into her ragged palms; when high school is a thing of the past and college has nearly joined it, too – Byulyi thinks light is not so bad, after all. It can't be bad because Yongsun is all light, all day every day, glowing from within. When Yongsun smiles, Byulyi has to hold out her cupped hands to collect the brightness pouring out of her eyes, but she never manages to catch it all. Byulyi's always been clumsy that way.

It's good, for a while. Byulyi doesn't need to seek out the dark anymore; she's content to hide her face in Yongsun's soft neck all through the night whenever Yongsun is in their bed, where she belongs.

She isn't always.

“She's cheating on you, you know,” says the ghost once, as Byulyi is walking home from her part-time job. She works the graveyard shift four times a week in a little convenience store; the ghost pops in often to keep her company.

“She isn't doing anything I don't know about.”

“She's ashamed of you,” hisses the ghost, her beautiful face twisted up into something almost feral.

Byulyi laughs. The ghost can be quite adorable sometimes, in her own strange way.

“She's _normal_ ,” Byulyi explains patiently. “She's looking for a husband to have babies with. It's just what normal people do.”

The ghost howls. It sounds like the wind, and Byulyi thinks of her later, when the winds of change are rattling the windows of her small apartment and Yongsun's tight voice is barely audible over the racket.

“Please clean this mess,” Yongsun says, pointing at the bathroom mirror where Byulyi wrote _You're the SUN to my MOON!!_ ღ in Yongsun's brightest red lipstick as soon as she woke up.

It's a stupid pun, Byulyi knows, but she didn't expect Yongsun to get quite so mad about it.

“Are you listening to me, Byulyi? Clean this mess up and don't ever touch my makeup again. Do you have any idea how expensive that one tube was? What are you, _twelve_?”

Byulyi is too old to run away from home, so she simply stays out after work, ambling around aimlessly among groups of drunk college students and businessmen. She doesn't drink. She's still nursing a headache from the smell of the rubbing alcohol she used in the morning to clean the mirror, scrubbing quickly and quietly so Yongsun could do her makeup for work.

“I don't think I can live like this anymore,” Yongsun told her as she was putting on her shoes; shiny black stilettos which made her feet ache by the end of the day, so bad there would be tears in her eyes sometimes as Byulyi tried to rub the pain away with frantic hands.

“I understand,” Byulyi said, even though she really doesn't.

To this day, Byulyi doesn't understand why people try to feed their dead. She asked the ghost, once, but the ghost only shrugged; offered, “Why do people feed the ungrateful living?”

Byulyi isn't running because there's no one chasing her, but her feet keep carrying her farther and farther away from everything she knows; away from the city with its careless words and toxic lights, down old roads which turn into dirt roads under a sky full of stars.


End file.
